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Siri will change the game

My first real alert to Siri came in early October, the day before the iPhone 4s launch. I had heard about it earlier, in April 2010, when Apple made its mysterious purchase from SRI, but hadn’t paid it much attention since.

The alert came in the form of a quick note from a friend in response to my pre-launch coverage of the iPhone 4s, which noted that Apple likes to introduce some capability with each product update that makes an upgrade compelling, even from the most recent model. I got as far as indicating that the innovation that would make people buy didn’t have to be hardware. It could be software or a service. But I didn’t see Siri itself.

My friend said, “The big thing to watch is the Siri integration … If it works well and is well integrated (as you would expect from Apple), it could very well be a game-changer.”

He should know. A guy with impeccable software credentials and a long history of calling things right, he and I used to work together on just such technology: computational linguistics, including provisions for speech recognition and language understanding.

But the fullness of what Siri could become was elucidated in greater detail and with much farther-reaching implications this week by Tim Bajarin, the most senior of the senior tech analysts.

Bajarin is the analyst’s analyst, a guy anybody would want at the table. He was there at the dawn of the PC market and knew Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and other pioneers right at the beginning. I myself was lost in minicomputer land and didn’t find the PC market for another decade.

Another important point about Bajarin is that he had Steve Jobs’s ear; that is, as much as anybody did. In the 35 years since he first learned about Apple, he was the only analyst who consistently sat at Apple’s table. Always discreet, circumspect in his press quotes, and a believer in even Apple’s darkest times, he resided in that rarest of places, the sanctum sanctorum inside Apple.

When he laid out his picture of how Siri could become Apple’s platform to disintermediate Google (and, as a bonus, Microsoft) in the search advertising business, I wondered about a couple of things. This disquisition revealed more about where Apple might go than anything I’d ever seen from him.

It occurred to me that his full revelation might represent real knowledge of what Apple is doing. Was he letting his discretion down a notch because Jobs was no longer around to get angry about it? Or was he just using his perspective and superb analytical ability to ferret out the likely unfolding of events?

On checking with him, he assured me that this was all his own idea and scoffed when I tried to call it brilliant. Siri is, even more than a voice input device, the front end to any number of databases, some of which Apple has and others of which it could buy with its $80-odd billion in retained earnings. If Siri takes a user straight to OpenTable, why ask Google anything about where to eat? It turns out that the major databases people really care about are pretty finite: weather, food, maps, entertainment content, and a few other things.

Only firms with huge back-end operations like Amazon can thrive in a Siri world because Apple won’t buy Amazon, and people will still make Amazon a destination when they are buying certain goods.